Saturday, 31 December 2011

This isn't a good article or a short one; it's just copied out of curiosity.
It was next to one that's quoted in another blog post here about bad teaching by an economics professor who moved from the US to the UK in the 1960s, taking teaching standards with him. He would have read it. The problem of unhappy students and puzzled teachers applies particularly to sciences and economics I think, with economics students the ones to complain.

The problems are
(1) Presumption that entrance threshold exam scores are low - which was true of the Keele foundation year that I signed-up to in 1983 but not of the main degree course.
(2) Colleges for 20-odds ignoring previous work done as teenagers, which was true of Keele economics department. At the time, social science A-levels were often done by repeated essay-writing from original sources; they weren't bad, but we did a bit about X-shaped diagrams in economics A-level as well.
(3) Presumption that you need to learn or teach theory before practice, starting with X-shaped diagrams in economics for example on my university course, going-on to teach them again in year two as the AD AS model, and again in year three as revision. On this system, Mr Morris Lord Nuffield would never have started repairing bicycles in his parents' garden shed aged 15. He would have stayed-on at school for Physics A-level, then gone to some kind of higher education, and only then be allowed to put all the theory together to repair a bicycle at some age like 25. They would have taught how the wheel worked at A-level, then again in the first year of higher education, then possibly in the middle year, and then they would have explained wheels again to the young Mr Morris as revision.
(4) Government getting interested in pointy things, instead of social insurance which is its main job.

Related:International Student Course Satisfaction
Table of feedback scores for the economics degrees for the universities that take most international students. Most of the courses are at the bottom of the league table for student feedback

IS HIGHER EDUCATION A HOAX?

WHEN A RUSSIAN ROCKET blasted itself successfully into orbit in October, 1957, and launched the term sputnik into the international vocabulary, the reverberations were felt nowhere in the universe as strongly as in the American educational world. Americans, presuming that no one else should ever lead them in technology, were convulsed in a panic of national humiliation. A scape-goat was demanded, and education—traditionally the American's recourse as a cure-all—had to bear the onus. This belated concern with the nation's schools would have been entirely salutary had it been less emotional and more thoughtful, less transitory and more profound. The panic has now subsided, and apart from the John Dewey bogey and federal loans to a few science students, it has left no important change. The real problems, which have long been with us, are still being overlooked.

A curious fact about the sputnik panic in American education was the exemption of the colleges from the pangs of national self-reproach. The high schools have borne the brunt—though not without deserving it. Apparently people assumed—and still do—that we need only get the largest possible number of students through high school and into college, perhaps with a push in the direction of science, and then everything will take care of itself automatically. College teachers may be popularly scorned as soft-boiled egg-heads, but the college as an institution commands unthinking respect. Actually, the true merits are the reverse. College teachers on the whole are able, commendable, self-sacrificing in-dividuals, but the system of college education in the United [p355] States is — unbeknownst to most, except the teachers — in a critical state.

There are at present approximately three million students in institutions of so-called higher education in the United States. The numbers of youth aspiring to join them are growing ever larger, thanks to the World War II birth rate and the ambitions fed by prosperity. If the demand can be met, it is conservatively estimated that, in a decade or less, double the present number of students will be studying at what is supposed to be the college level. Quantitatively this is all that the most agitated sputnik alarmists could wish for.

But in the qualitative respect the prospects are not to automatically bright. Americans seriously deceive themselves if they imagine that the stream of college graduates pouring through the open floodgates means the miraculously expanded production of mature and dextrous minds. What do our millions in college really mean, when the college, betrayed by the boggy foundation of the American high school, sinks to the level of a remedial secondary boarding school? Real education is left to the graduate schools, where the same process has set in. They must expand to give the capable secondary-education products of the colleges an opportunity for genuine college-level study, whether of a general or vocational nature. The waste is colossal, in money, faculty talent, and students' time--everyone is taking years more to reach the level for which his capacities destine him. We have not yet reached the end: as the mass of master's and doctoral candidates multiplies in search of a college education, a brand-new rung has to be added to the ladder—"post-doctoral" training—so that a talented few can get the training as experts that they missed before.

I. Democracy and the Right to Education

The causes of the debasement of standards in American higher education are not hard to diagnose, though the cure [p356] may be difficult. Some of the most cherished assumptions about the "American way of life" must be called into question if real change is to be brought about. Our educational system is professedly operated according to the principle that access to education is something people have a right to. Since it is clear that a democratic society most insist on equal rights for all citizens, it follows from the first assumption that everyone has an equal right to go to college, and that any educational selectivity is "undemocratic." No less an authority than the President's Committee on Education Beyond the High School (mercifully, not on "Higher Education") has declared, "This country will never tolerate the nurturing of an educational elite."

Such a proposition betrays a dubious comprehension of the nature of education, even if it renders the nation's will accurately. The idea that practically everyone can and should be educated equally is an irresponsible perversion of the very essence of education. Do the proponents of the Committe's view actually believe that none should be educated beyond the level to which all can be brought, that the lowest common denominator will determine the limits of attainment for all? Undoubtedly not, for it would require the stifling of all specialized and technical training that rests on superior ability, and lead speedily to national disaster. The Russian earth satellites dealt a heavy blow to equalitarianism in the preparation of engineers and scientists.

The President's Committee more probably had in mind the less far-fetched notion that all students should be educated together in the same system, with the more talented continuing farther. This is the usual practice—everyone swims in the some educational channel, as far as his ability can carry him; at any age level, education is the some for all, with special preferment for none. This position is still a serious threat to educational quality, since it disregards completely the importance of sequence and preparation, not to [p 357] mention the varying learning capacities of different students at the same age.

Many educators seem to feel that all persons at a given age-level should pursue the same course and get the same educational "opportunity." The level of work has to be held down where all can manage it, regardless of their ability or future needs. While it is often the custom in large high schools to offer separate college-preparatory and non-college curricula, to many students aspire to college and its benefits (half or more of all high-school students) that the benefit of selectivity is lost. Very little solid preparation is provided for the students who go on to advanced work, even though they may have the ability to undertake such preparation before-hand; the lost opportunities of the high-school years are tragic. The fault lies with the disastrous assumption that the same education is appropriate for students who are ending their education at a given level, and for those who are going ahead. The idea of separate paths is denounced as undemocratic, without thought of the need which a democratic society above all others has for a good proportion of members who have been well educated.

Unfortunately, our society is already suffering and will suffer still more from a dearth of properly educated individuals. The college gets students who
(1) are unprepared because they have been given a "democratic" education, the standards of which have been watered down to the remedial grade-school level; and who
(2) come in increasingly large numbers with increasingly dubious capacity for achieving the objectives of college education.

With these unprepared and often incompetent freshmen the college has to undertake the simultaneous tasks of
(1) giving them the college preparatory material that they should have gotten before (i.e., the function of a remedial high-school);
(2) attempting to give them the college-type "liberal" education (i.e., teaching them to think); and
(3) imparting vocational career training [p358] to them. Any one of these tasks is enough for a four-year institution, even granting the requisite ability among its student body. In combination, and with the standards of student admission and retention being what they are, the task imposed on the college is insuperable.

No wonder, then, that in this age of mass education the capable student rarely realizes his potential. He fails to get in high school the solid foundation of information and skills which he needs for advanced intellectual effort, and which he is best able to acquire at this age. The college comes too late, and with too little systematic concern for the student's basic mental development. The average graduate retains from his college experience little more than could be taught in high school to superior groups, plus some specialized training (the "major") that is too weak, too haphazard, and too un-related to career goals to be of much use. The specific objec-tive of liberal education in colleges (which, if I may dare to assert it, is to make people into intellectuals) proves to be a shimmering mirage.

II. The Aims of Education—In Reality

This state of affairs has certainly not been willed by educators, whatever their philosophies. It is the result of pressure —pervasive social pressure—which the educators and their institutions are in no position to resist. The perversion of higher education has come about in response to what American society has demanded, and the demands of American society represent a perverted idea of what education is for.

While the possible aims and objectives of higher education are manifold, the main alternatives can be grouped into four areas. People can be trained with primary emphasis on preparing them to contribute to national defense and the technical progress of the country; to contribute creatively to the cultural and scientific heritage of civilization; to develop their individual personalities, capacities, sensitivities, [p359] and interests; or to pursue a career and make money. There are two separate choices here—between the individual and the social emphasis, and between material and non-material objectives. Traditionally, American education has been in-dividual and material in its orientation—training the individual for personal advancement and business success. Of late, public concern has also extended to the social ends of material knowledge, thanks to the challenge which Soviet technical progress has posed to American national power. On the non-material side, however, little is intended or ac-omplished save by accident. The common talk of develop-ing the student as a person is rarely taken seriously, and the cultural tradition survives only because individuals are able to exploit it to the advantage of their careers.

The real purpose for which education is usually sought in this country is personal advancement. The college degree is regarded as a ticket for a life-time ride on the escalator of success. Computations have even been made of the actual monetary value of the degree in terms of the increment of income that it brings in over the years. For the female students, as everyone knows, the important objective is not the degree of B.A., but the esteemed degree of MRS. which customarily follows it. The woman goes to college in order to attach herself to a man who has won a fair guarantee of status and success, also by going to college. What is actually important about college work, from this point of view, is not what is learned, but the badge of status which is acquired, and the friends, contacts, and angles that are accum-ulated or explored. The business firm, recruiting its sales-men or its personnel administrators or its glorified decks—anyone who meets the public—cares not so much for the specific training its candidates have had, as for their college-bred respectability (and perhaps for the general intelligence and responsibility which that presumably carries with it). The college man has the mark of upper-middle-class rank, [p360] admitting him to the careers where prestige is expected and confirmed. It is no accident that the armed services, and particularly the more caste-conscious Navy, were so solicitous for the educational background of their officer corps even in the direst days of wartime.

The difficulties of American higher education are attributable to a curious combination of circumstances. Both our democratic professions and our class-conscious practices impose their contradictory demands. Everyone wants to get ahead, and education is the means to do this (thanks not to what it is, but to what it symbolizes). On the other hand, we insist on the principle of equality of opportunity: the educa-tional means for getting ahead must be open to everyone on an equal basis. It is undemocratic, supposedly, to favor one person with a superior education that gives him the opportu-nity to get ahead, while another is condemned to labor among the helots. The same education for all, the exclusion of none, passing marks for everybody, and the submergence of un-usual and valuable talent because the talented must not be given an unfair advantage in the competitive scramble to get ahead—this is what our national ideology demands of the educational system as a whole.

Relieved of practically all challenge or pressure, college students are all too often a spoiled, apathetic, or devil-may-care lot. They choose their courses on the basis of minimum work and the most convenient time of day; content counts for nothing—which does not matter, since it is so promptly for-gotten anyway. After a year or so some students cannot even remember which courses they have taken, let alone any of their substance. Meanwhile, students most kill time while they serve off their four years. This necessity is admirably provided for by the facilities and activities which the average campus offers. Students enjoy a continuous orgy of fraternity socializing and alcoholizing, punctuated with spectacular mob celebrations. [p361] The colleges lead the whole nation as far as spectator sports are concerned, ranging from mock war on the gridiron to the vicarious eroticism of campus queen elections. With those who actually play the game we are not here concerned, since they are less students than paid performers, honest members of the university service staff, to to speak. The social and athletic side of college is indeed so successful that millions of additional students, who are devoid of intellectual interest and otherwise would simply not have bothered, are drawn by the lodestone of the ivy-covered Elysium. They cannot resist the attraction of the four-year pastoral idyll of academic life, and come surging through the gates to join the big picnic.

But as the student totals are swelled by everyone in search of social status or amusement, there are untoward consequences even for those to whom education is but the ante-room to success. As the number of people gilded with the veneer of higher education multiplies, the market value of a college degree gets watered down. There are, naturally, only a limited number of positions at each level in the hierarchy of success and prestige, but more and more people are getting educations and competing for these positions. Naturally, for any given position the people with the most education have the advantage; as others seek to match their rivals, those with still more education will be preferred. The typist for whom a high-school diploma used to be more than enough now gives way to the girl fresh out of junior college or the secretarial school; the clerk must now have all of college behind him; the office manager who formerly did fine on four years of college must now have a graduate degree in business administration; and so on. In short, the educational price of social and occupational status is being bid up and up.

This is hardly the end. The democratic principle still operates. As it becomes necessary to have more education to achieve a given level of success, the cry goes up to broaden [p362] educational opportunities and lower the undemocratic barriers of prerequisites and admission standards. High school must be made available—and passable—to everyone; hence, high school is reduced to the grade school level. College must be made available to everyone who wants it, or thinks he wants it. Some people think that because they are taxpayers their children have a legal right to go to the state university regardless of their merit. College accordingly sinks to the high-school level. We are witnessing a process of educational inflation. More and more people spend more and more time (and money) getting education that is poorer and poorer, in order that all may compete on a democratic basis for the preferred positions in a social hierarchy. This is the force which is driving American education into the dismal swamp of mediocrity.

III. Consumer Sovereignty in Education

Economists employ in their jargon the expression "consumer sovereignty" to denote the situation in which the nature of what is produced and sold is determined not by some outside power that thinks it knows best, but by the preferences of the buyers - in other words, where the customer is always right. In an all too literal sense, this is the state of affairs in American higher education. Educators have not only lost control over whom they admit and the prerequisites for higher education; they have also lost control over the nature and quality of their own instruction.

The student-customers are accorded free choice of institutions, curricula, and courses. Thanks to this unrestricted selection of educational tidbits in the academic supermarket, no one is in a position to see that students get a balanced diet or the proper amount of roughage. Items which are hard to swallow simply will not move: subjects which are not pabubated for spoonfeeding, but are instead presented in their true nature as difficult challenges, will go stale on the shelf for [p363] lack of takers. For the student it is all the same: the credit hours are totalled up, whether they come hard or easy, and the prestige embodied in the degree or the husband is proudly carried off. College faculties appear to be incapable of making students do that is good for them. Students cannot be driven with any discipline through a course of training that is hard, unpalatable, but in the end rewarding.

The prevailing attitude toward the educational process among educators themselves and especially among administrators in institutions of higher learning is no different from the industrialist's view of his manufacturing establishment. The college is in business; students are its customers; credit hours and degrees are its product. Operations of the enterprise are guided strictly according to the rules of business: strive to boost output and sales (enrollment and degrees); maximize profits (the contributions, appropriations, and prestige which accrue to the institution); endeavor by all means to keep production at capacity, and lower the price (standards of admission and passing) if part of the plant is in danger of stand-ing idle for lack of customers.

Successful operation of the educational enterprise depends, in the last analysis, on the appetite and good will of the customer. Since the customer is always right, nothing can be done which will offend him. The student must be "sold" on his courses. If instructors insist on standards that are unreasonable, the students will go elsewhere, and enrollment will drop. This is disastrous, since enrollment is to often taken to be the supreme test of educational success. Any instructor, department, or branch of a university which tries to make its instruction rigorous is likely to be passed over by the multitude and perhaps forced out of business.

Thanks to this overriding concern about the customers and the enrollment, it is difficult to hold college students to meaningful standards of achievement. Apart from the self-motivated few, no more than to pathetic minimum of work can be [p364] evoked from them. Difficult assignments like the writing of papers cease to be imposed. The test of a teacher is his popularity—which at some institutions is literally voted on by the students: the successful teacher is the clown. Higher education has become a juvenile branch of the entertainment industry.

IV. Academic Entrepreneurship

The blame for the lapse of standards in the colleges does not lie entirely in one direction. It must be shared by the educators themselves, since they are responsible for allowing themselves to be cast in the role of hawkers of educational merchandise. There are extenuating circumstances, to be sure--particularly the impossibility, with the mass of raw material that college teachers have to contend with, of making headway toward the college's traditional objectives. So faculties have found another outlet by going into business. Tremendous energy is often devoted to expanding the enterprise, building the department, developing new fields of instruction. More buildings are demanded; more institutes, more programs, more courses, are added, with little regard for the number or needs of the students, who are only the excuse and not the purpose for all this effort. Quantity rules over all: maximize the enrollment, maximize the budget, maximize the staff, maximize prestige, maximize "research" (for the sake of prestige), maximize power. Such are the governing values of the industrial bureaucracy which administers the modern American factory-university.

In sympathy with the educators thus ensnared in a world not of their own making, I should point out that they seem often to be driven to this behavior by the otherwise totally unreal nature of the milieu in which they work: serious men surrounded by gawking juveniles, going through the motions of an educational operation which has lost most of its meaning. Campus politics are probably so bitter because the faculty [p365] have no other adult arena and the alternative is to lose their minds.

The often dismal state of teachers' morale tragically compounds the damage to higher education. Faced with a near-hopeless task in dealing with their students, faculties have turned away from it altogether, to concern themselves not with education but with the impressive elaboration of their institutions and programs. Courses are given for the sake of the courses and of appearances in the catalogue; students are not the object but merely the excuse. Sometimes the excuse breaks down: Acre was the case of the well-known university which hired a professor (against the wishes of the department concerned) primarily for the purpose of offering a specialized course on a certain exotic area of the world, only to find when the term began that not a single student wanted to sign up for the course! This is just an extreme case of the proliferation of specialized courses and programs, packing and merchandising fragmented bits of useless and soon-to-be-forgotten knowledge, while the fundamental task of educating the hapless, confused, unprepared students is completely lost sight of.

The modern American university is taking more and more students, who demand and receive admission for purposes of their own, and using them for purposes of its own. Neither purpose—neither the students' competition for careers with prestige nor the faculties' drive to build their enterprises—has very much to do with education. The two sets of purposes do, however, dovetail; student and faculty purposes facilitate one another's achievement, while both work to exclude real education from the process.

The trouble is deeply rooted in the underlying values of American society. Education—real college-level education of the thinking process—is neglected because people are not really interested in it, or because other interests are allowed to overwhelm it. The interests and values which are responsible for perverting higher education are, to be sure, difficult [p366] to check: they prevail throughout our society. They are nothing more nor less than the interests and values of competitive success in a world of big organizations. Students and faculties alike have succumbed. The university, in this society whose every facet is industrialized, has truly become a diploma mill.

V. Mass Education Versus Selective Education

If higher education is to mean anything at all, it must become a serious business: the strenuous development of stu-dents with the requisite capacity. Anything else means tremendous waste—as at present the time and money of the average student is wasted in a drawn-out, low-standard education, and as the time and talent of the superior student are wasted by the same thing. Education must be hard work.

Furthermore, the educational goal must itself be stated anew. Education is provided by society for a social purpose. It represents the cumulation of aeons of human effort and experience, which is far out of proportion to any payment the individual may be making for his educational privilege. The purpose of higher education should properly be thought of as the preparation of talented individuals to render as best they can a social service and make their maximum contribution to society.

This position is not incompatible with democracy; it is essential to take this view if both democracy and education are to survive together. Currently education is most often regarded as a right, from which personal benefits accrue. From this foliows the basic fallacy that education must be made available to all on an equal basis. Actually education (particularly higher education) should be regarded as a privilege, carrying with it definite obligations. The aim is not an "elite," but a democratic society whose talented members have both the ability and the sense of obligation to make their [p367] most effective contribution to the material and spiritual de-velopment of the whole. We will get nowhere if we do not recognize wide differences in individual abilities. Differences are especially wide in the particular ability which is (or ought to be) the foundation for "liberal" education—the ability to conceptualize, i.e., to use abstract ideas, to make inferences, to generalize, etc. Hundreds of thousands of students now pursuing liberal arts courses are wasting their time and their parents' or the public's money (except from the standpoint of social success) because their abilities simply do not run in this direction. It is also essential to recognize that the effective training of superior students must begin early. It is too late to wait until college, when even the capable students must lose time in remedial courses. In mathematics, English, foreign languages, and history, foundations must be laid down and abilities trained for many years before. The time for basic memory work expires before the end of the high-school age: students who have not learned spelling, grammar, dates, geography, and the multiplication table by that time will never do to with any ease or rapidity. College cannot really be what it claims to be unless its candidates have been rigor-ously and specially trained beforehand. We most face up to the obvious implications of these natural conditions of the educational process. Education of the college type has to be much more selective than it is now, and the selection has to begin much earlier. It is unfair both to future college students and to those who do not go beyond secondary school to expect both groups to pursue courses which are the same in content or equal in intensity. This means that high-school students most be channelled into more clearly distinguished curricula than at present (or into separate schools where feasible or advisable), and especially that the standards and requirements for the academically-bound students must be radically stiffened.[p368] The immediate future and the problems which it poses for the colleges point to an obvious first step. We now are in a crisis of too much quantity and too little quality, and the prospect is a sudden doubling of the quantity. Both the quality problem and the awesome problem of expansion can be attacked if the colleges simply refuse to expand, refuse to admit any larger numbers of students, keep the excess out by raising entrance requirements—or, more often, by re-estab-lishing entrance requirements. We are at a critical turning point. It is quality or quantity—education or the diploma mill. The choke must be made, and made quickly. The coming increase in the college-age population brings a hidden blessing—the chance to raise standards without the embar-rassing necessity of decreasing present enrollments. If this chance is not taken—if the country insists on expanding college facilities to take care of everyone who wants to be ad-mitted—higher education in the United States, with isolated exceptions, will be done for.

VI. Adapting the Colleges

If we grant the essential condition of holding fast on the en-rollment front, then the creation of a selective, effective, and democratic liberal education will require three major changes. One concerns the problem of mass education in the secondary schools, and how to square this with the need for college prerequisites. The second is the revision of college organization and instruction. The third has to do with society's attitude toward education and the student, and how he is selected and financed. Providing a really effective college-preparatory course at the secondary school level, with separate instruction and higher standards for the college-bound students, appears to be a task of staggering difficulty. There is a temporary remedy which suggests itself when one recognizes that most of what the college does in the first two years could and should have [p369] been done in high school. The solution is to short-circuit the latter by making a general practice of admitting all college-caliber students (measured, one must hope, by a standard higher than the present) into college after, say, the first two years of high school. Then introductory college courses would commence, taught, as they have to be even now, without assuming any prior foundation. The advantage is that two additional years would be gained for serious study. We could take these two years plus what are now the first two years of college and give a reasonably sound liberal education, with-out intruding upon the ground of specialized or vocational study which is now attempted in the college major. The latter, in turn, would be freed from the encroachments of general education, and could and should become a much more serious, effective, and practical undertaking, handled, perhaps, on the intellectual level of the present master's degree. Equally important with student standards and background for the attainment of a genuinely effective system of higher education is the revision of the present organization of in-struction. College curricula are now for the most part hopelessly fragmented and bogged down in the quantity mania of courses, grades, and credit hours. There should be a single basic curriculum: teaching how to think. Thought-processes must be imparted in a systematic and coordinated way in everything the student studies. There is nothing more ridicu-lous than the established practice of dividing a student up four, five, or site ways among as many instructors and having each go to work on him without any relation at all to what the others are doing. Finally, there should be no wide range of electives and specialties until professional training is undertaken. There are certain things which every educated person ought to know about; the faculty knows what these are bet-ter than the student does; and it is these studies which he should pursue as directed during his period of non-professional liberal education. [p370]

The last requirement is simple in nature, if not in application. Higher education is hard work, or should be; it is given in the interests of society as well as the individual, or should be; it should be open to all on an equal basis, with ability the sole criterion of qualification. Granting these conditions, all serious students deserve and must have public support for the pursuit of their education. This can be extended both through liberal scholarships supported by both the national and state governments, and through loans which will be written off in whole or in part in return for such public service work as teaching. The student who has to work on the side to pay his way through college is inevitably sacrificing some of his educational accomplishment, and this defeats the whole purpose of having him in college. Society is training in the colleges its future servants and benefactors; it owes them firm support, and they in turn ought to incur an honorable obligation of service.

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Transcription of a free-to-watch video on Vimeo. Translaters see footnote. Best seen on another screen but this is the ebedded versionhttp://vimeo.com/33628943

HI - I guess we'll go ahead & get started. You are in thePractical Drupal Commerce Session. I am Ryan Schama of Commerce Guys. I live in Louseville Kentucky but I - I've been to two Drupal Camp rosters. I went to the first one two years ago. I don't know why we didn't make it out last year, but I was pretty bummed, and so I pushed hard for us to come this year.

And what I'm going to be doing today is not talking about Drupal Commerce so much as showing what it would actually look like to set up a site using Drupal Commerce. And I have a couple of demo sites that I'll also use to show you examples. I'm going to treat it like I've just been given a project by a client to build a Dallas Cowboys fan site. Just selling some Dallas Cowboys Merch[andise] . And if you want to introduce some Scope Creep as I am building this site feel free to raise a hand, and we'll take in a different direction. So feel free to introduce some scope creep on me this one time only!
1' [one minute]

So just a little bit of background about myself. I have been with Commerce Guys since 2009. We were just three guys and now we are up to about 36 based in the US & Paris. Part of that growth came out of a merger with the french company AF83 that put-on Drupalcom Paris if you were there. Their Drupal guys came-in to Commerce Guys and we started afresh in Paris. Which is why I am a cheese fan and have brought some cheese with me.

Whenever commerce first started I was the project lead for Ubercart for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 and we were getting close to thinking about Drupal 7 Ubercart, and that's about when Commerce Guys started, and I quickly because Drupal Commerce. So I am no longer the project lead and maintainer of Ubercart; instead I am the lead developer for Drupal Commerce. Which is a complete re-write of Ubercart, with a functionally equivalent feature-set on Drupal 7, taking advantage of Drupal 7's Core Entities and Fields and Rules2 and Views 3, and so-on, and so-forth, and everything good that has come accross the Drupal world in the last couple of years

My last Ubercart presentation was here in Drupal Camp Austin in 2009. Vimeo.com/9322909
I said"here is what you can do with Ubercart" because we had an application mind-set in which what really mattered was the out of the box experience.

What you could do once you had installed the actual modules themselves.
What kind of store would you have?
How few steps would have have before you started selling your stuff online using Ubercart?

I guess that what that sort of mind-set got us was a lot of application dead ends for developers to really customise what they could do with their ecommerce web site. And so you had challenges with multi-lingual sites; multi-currency web sites. We had challenges with sites where you didn't have traditional product models : where you didn't need a product page for example; where you just wanted a sort of product floating somewhere like an event registration or a membership or something else that's not a traditional product-page-type-of-thing. You were really tied to Ubercart's understanding of your business model or understanding of your product presentation or checkout workflow. You couldn't customise the checkout. You couldn't rip the checkout and the cart in the checkout apart. But if you installed everything at once and needed a store to run as Ubercart ran it was great! It still is. If you need to build a site right now, using Ubercart on Drupal 6, you can probably get going quite quickly. A lot of the contrib[uted module]s are there that you would need. It's still very application focused. If you think about Drupal: how many other modules do you use on a consistant basis, where all you really care about is how the module works once you install it?
4'
There are some smaller-feature modules were that is true, but you don't just install Views, and expect not to have to tinker with Views. You install Views because you want a system that you can customise how you are displaying your content on different parts of the web site. Or your RSS feeds or your export feeds or whatever. Or if you think about Content Construction Kit (CCK) at the time. You didn't just install CCK out of the box. The major contributed systems in Drupal were more about giving you a tool set or a framework for building a different kind of thing, whether it was your content type or your display page or perhaps your organic group system or whatever else.

Drupal 7 has really privelaged us to think again about how we can build an ecommerce framework (we call it) that focusses less on what you can do with it out of the box and more on what you can build with it. We took queues [ideas] from Views and CCK. At the same time Rules and Organic Groups [modules] also did this. We were focussing more on the components that you need to drive your ecommerce web site, and how they are loosely-coupled but can be adapted and mixed-and-matched to create the ecommerce experience that you need for your website.

What I like to say is that Drupal Commerce will give you a store out of the box if you just install all of the modules. But it is going to make hardly any hard-coded assumptions about your business logic; about your business model, about whatever it is that you are selling, about how you need to display it. Hardly any hard-coded assumptions. There are less tools for you as a developer to work against; more tools for you to work with.

We have let people from the git clone [?] use Drupal Commerce for a wide variety of sites. The very first one that was really big and publicised was Eurocentres.com, which if you want to check it out is ...res.com instead of ers.com because it is a European site.
6'
What they did was they were selling language learnig courses all over the world with a multi-lingual, multi-currency site, with highly custom add-to-cart-forms and custom checkout processes. It was just a very custom web site that was built because of Drupal Commerce. They could not have done this it on Drupal 6. They really needed the new data models and the flexibility of fieldable entities and the changes in rules to make their stuff happen.

And quickly after that, like way on the other side of the map was a donation-based web site where it was donation campaigns. It was kind of a Kickstarter.com for green initiatives in different boroughs in New York City called IOBY.org. And next thing was they're creating a totally custom add-to-cart process, where you're able to specify a donation amount for the project, map it to a campaign, and then they had their Views you know, taking all the payments for this one campaign, and sort of filling-up their "progress meters" and all this stuff. Because all they knew they needed was a way to track a monetary amount linked to a line item which references in itself some campaign. And then they could do all the visualisation and reporting that they needed to do. And because of the flexibility of Drupal Commerce's pricing system they were easily able to sort-of change the price of whatever donation product was in the shopping cart to match whatever the customer said. And I can actually demonstrate that although how that fits-in to selling Cowboy shirts I'm not sure!

[screen: let's build a cowboys fan site that .....

sells autographed merchandise

sells official team jerseys

lets you customize a jersey

charges flat rate shipping

offers bulk shipping discounts

collects 6.25% Texas sales tax]

But I said I didn't want to talk too much [7-8"] about Drupal Commerce sort of high-level without just digging into a site. But we're going to do that now and this is sort of the template that we're going to follow here.
7'22"-7'44" repeats screen
I really do want this session to be practical & hands-on, so if you do have any questions just raise your hand and I will call on to you.
7'55"And I'm also going to show this off. So this is my Do It With Drupal site that's a clone of Apple's online store. So I use this to preface, I guess, how we are going to sort of build stuff. I'll give you a visual sort of how-we-are-going-to-build-stuff that we can look at while we are waiting for our Drupal site to install.

Alright: so. Lets flip-over to the browser, because the first thing we are going to do is install Drupal Commerce. So I just got handed this project; I just got tasked with it. I need to build a store quickly, and one of the fastest ways that you can get up and running with Drupal Commerce is with Commerce Kickstart. It's an installation program that I maintain. That will install Drupal Commerce with all of its dependencies. That includes Views, Rules, Addressfield, C[haos]tools and ... [screen shows a progress bar and lists of modules installing]
So it will install all its dependencies and a couple of modules and configue to make sure that your shopping cart block is showing, to make sure that your permissions have been granted properly and everything else. And it will also give me an opportunity to set-up some sort of example store content.

So while that progress bar is going, this is the Pinapple store that I built for
9'
Dua Drupal. And as you can see it looks strikingly similar to store.apple.com And the lions' share of the work in this web site was actually (- oh it's not adaptive apparently. It wasn't disigned for a xxxx display -)
So the lion's share of work in this site was theming. So I spent about 40 hours building this website. Maybe five of those was throwing the Drupal site and Commerce and Views together. The other 35 hours would have been making it look like apple.com. And learning some tricks along the way. So if you're curious about those tricks feel free to find me afterwards but I'm not a great theme writer. I did put my "themer" sticker on [for the conference seminars] but I'm very much amateur. This is my first theme ever. So I'm guessing that some of you could do this much faster than I did.

So I'm interested in that we're going to sell just regular merchandise. So we have just a regular product page. We do have some of those on this website. And you can go to the piPhone, and then click-over to select our piPhone,
10'
- not responsive. Looks great on 1074 x 758px. And Apple has these sort of splash pages that then redirect to their actual product pages. And this would be - once it loads - just a basic product page to select some attribute of the piPhone, whether it is your colour, or your hard disc size. As you select the colour you will see the image update. This is just core Commerce functionality using the new Ajax framework in Drupal 7. The price will also update on the screens - that's way down here in the corner! But if I upgrade my hard drive to 64GB the price is going to shoot-up and I am going to add that to my card. So we'll demonstrate how I built this using the different sizes of the jerseys that we're going to be selling.

And I also said that we can do customisable products. With Drupal Commerce it's quite easy to take an add to cart form and expose additional fields that must be filled out. [screen shows buttons and titles overlapping on big scale] Wow that looks awsome! In the add to cart form.
11
So what we have here: I'm interested in that Drupal Commerce does not force a particular type of product display on you. So we had in the one instance the iPhone where we had all the different options and you select them and it's one add to cart form . For the iPods I actually had a separate product page for each model which is what Apple does for some reason, and now this is just a View of my actual product display nodes. So I have a separate node for each of my ipod models, and this is just a view that's displayed as a grid, with some custom theming on the links and what-not.

So you pick your model and then once you go there you actually have to customise your ipod. So this is where you do things like specify your custom name of custom number or whatever.

So this is done by attaching fields to the line item that's actually going to be added to my shopping cart whenever this product is added to my cart. So I'll demonstrate how I set that up. And then I won't bother going to checkout because I'm sure it looks horrible and it costs $600 and because Commerce Kickstart has done installing.

So has anybody here not used an installation profile before?
12
A few haven't. It's kind of like getting more and more privelidged inside of Drupal to the point where you can include not just module installation but additional steps. So you can install and configure themes during the installation process, and I guess there are probably some other things you can do with them but those are the main things you can do with them. And then Drupal.org itself will let you include a .make file with your installation profile so it can actually bundle everything into one tarball for you including Drupal Core. So this is the way that people will begin making distributions of Drupal. Is by taking an installation profile, all the modules and custom theme and basically creating a custom experience for a particular business model or type of product. Package it up into one discreet tarball that somobody that is really new to Drupal - doesn't know how to click through everything and set it up - they can go and grab and start selling immediately.

And so one of the best examples that I've seen so far for Drupal Commerce is
13Open Deals App. It's just Opendealsapp.com. And they've actually taken Groupon and cloned it into Drupal using Drupal Commerce with their kind of straight-on rip-off Groupon theme, and you just download their app and you have a Drupal Groupon kind of site that you can start to customise and quickly deploy for your clients. This is actually a fairly common feature request in our queue at least - I don't know how many of you guys get those requests. Honestly if I got a request like that; if somebody asked them to build a Groupon clone I'd just say go use Groupon, but maybe you have a newspaper or a local organisation wants you to build something like this so you can use Opendealsapp as your launch point.

And the idea here is you're trying to give or we're just trying to give site builders and new users just a very basic starting point to customise the Groupon site so you don't have to do the same stuff over and over again for every Drupal site you're building.

Now the same holds true for Commerce: we have Commerce Kickstart which is designed to get you up and running with just the core Commerce modules as quick as possible
14
Right now we don't even have a custom theme. I'm just using Bartek. I am using the Admin menu with the Admin Menu toolbar that it comes with, so it makes it look like the core toolbar but it's not really. I should probably disable that for the purposes of this demonstration. I'm just going to go back to the core - you know I'm scrared to go back to this because I'd have to go back to this sort of five times...

Alright so we have our Kickstart site. The project was first we were going to start off selling autographed merchandise.

So as you can see Commerce Kickstart did start off creating three basic products for me, numbered one two three with nodes displaying them. What you see here is actually a node that's set-up by commerce Kickstart. It's a node type called Product Display. This node type has a product reference field on it. So the actual product data if I were going to edit this node, you're not going to find a product price or SKU field or anything. What you have instead is this product reference field, where by putting in the SKU, this field associates product three with this particular node. If you're familiar with the way that fields work either in [Drupal] six or in [Drupal] seven, you have a widget where you specify how does this field's data get entered, then you have a display formatter that detirmines how that data, once it's attached to this node, is going to be displayed in different view modes. So: how will that product reference field be displayed in a teasier versus a full node. And one of the display formatters that comes with Commerce is an add-to-cart-form display formatter. So the way this add to cart form shows up here in this node is that this node is associated with product three: the display formatter says
"hey! make me an add to cart form for product three". And it throws it in here.

So what I can do is on, I guess, the product list side , if we go to Store Menu; I have a view of products, I have products one two and three, so lets get started and edit product three and lets make this into just
16'
an autographed football. So I think I have a football autographed by Troy Akeman. [types TROY-AKEMAN into the SKU field of the edit view for product three] I can type quicker with two hands. [puts microphone on stand] holds it here.... Right: so we have a Troy Akeman football [types into teh Title field] I have an image here. By the way these image fields have been set-up for us by Drupal Commerce - you don't have to use that but most people when they're trying to test-out an ecommerce application they want to find that so we put them in there. And the image field is actually attached to my product.
16'39"
You can either attach the images to the product itself or the node that's displaying the product. It's really kind of up to you and the products that you're selling. In this case it probably wouldn't matter. I could have just thrown this image field on the node itself because I'm only going to have one image, or at least one set of images for the football. There aren't multiple different footballs that I'm selling. But imagine if I had different colours
17'
and different styles of football. The brown, or the blue and white, or the Dallas Cowboys celebratory whatever football, you know maybe I would have an option to choose what colour football I want , and so I would want to have a different image appear based on that. So like I showed you with the pinApple store, as I chose a black versus a white piPad or piPhone, I mean it was actually changing the image on the page, because it was pulling that data straight from the product that's actually selected on the form.
17'27" [long pause for question] Yes agreed. Yes it's very impractical huh. Yes: no no.
17'53" Just so everbody heard.

The feedback here was that the architecture makes sense. Like we know that we need like a discreet set of product data [18] that exists somewhere, that isn't tied to any particular disciplin. Like you might have multiple ways of displaying the product; multiple languages, and you might want to keep each language display associated with one discreet set of product data.

But for just the casual store owner. When they come and see this thing, like [they ask] "Wait: why am I going to adminsiter my product data in one place and then manage how its connected to stuff in another place?"

And it is frankly, that we expected and anticipated that this would be the main negative feedback for Drupal Commerce, for [version] 1.0 and it's going to lead into infinity, so you've got to say, look, we can get the archetecture right and then lets throw usability modules on top of it that sort of give us a more expected workflow.

And so what you have is there's a module called the Product Display Manager that lets you manage your display nodes from the back end.

And then what I'm working on is called the Inline Product Form Module that can...
Instead of having two separate places [to edit product display and product data],
you would just edit the node and on your node form you'd have the product added to that as well. I think that's what people are expecting and I think it's what you'd expect.
19
And so the goal was to get [version] 1.0 out-the-door, and see these other modules, sort of get developed that can address these usability concerns.

Some people have also taken to gluing these things together using Rules. And so they've made a Rule Set that whenever you create a new product node it would create a new product in the back end. And associate that with this product reference field that they hid from their users. I'm not a huge fan of that approach because it is tying quite a bit of your logic into Rules, that doesn't really need to be [tied-in]. So my hopes are really set on the Inline Product Form Module. I think that's probably the major-use case for just setting-up a store. Any other feedback?
19'43"
Any other feedback or questions about architecture or whatever?
The question was "Is there a sandbox for that?"...[not transcribed as temporary. By the way "updation" is a good word, newly invented below]
20'
If you go to my user page, I'm http://drupal.org/user/49344. You can get the links to my sandbox from there, and I'll get it promoted as soon as it's ready. Right now - I don't want to get off the rabit trail too much. But I have a lot of fun trying to figure out how to handle the creation, updation, and deletion of entities inside of another entitie's form, without committing all those changes before the main entity's form is submitted. So my module handles that but it doesn't actually have a product display node. So it's just ready for it, but I haven't had time to get it done. But the other stuff are done . The product display manager is available. The Rule sets are available niches [specialised options]. And then there's also a module that I was going to get to in a minute but now I've mentioned the others
20'44"
There's the bulk product creation module. That lists multiple options of products all at once. The module is [called] "commerce_bpc". So that's throw-up like all six different sizes and colour combinations instead of one product at a time. And you know it will get to that.
21'
So we do have our one product here - the Troy Aitken Football that's good to go. We can sell that. I've just added it to my shopping cart. I can go to checkout now and I can purchase this football. Let's talk about the jerseys. Because the jerseys are going to have multiple sizes. I'm going to have my small medium large and extra large jersey. And so the way I want to accomodate that is by first of all creating a new product type, because I am going to have to add an attribute field to it. I think that if you've done ecommerce before you're familiar with product attributes? These are the kinds of things that are basically user select-able options. So whenever they go to add to the cart , you have these groups of the different sizes or the different colours or wattages or whatever it is, you know, that you're selling (between apparrel or equipment or whatever) they can choose on the add to cart form the attribute that matches what they want.

Let me go to my product types here. It's kind of hidden here. Sorry about that. But I'm going to go to my product types tab and add a product type.
22'
The default one: well the default one that you have here [is called] product. It may be the only sort of product that you need. If you are only selling one sort of product on the site you can just go ahead and add whatever user fields you need to that; use it, and if you don't want it at all you can just delete it and create your own product types. It's really just there for new users to use, or for you to use if you only need to use one generic product type.

In our case we're going to add a jersey product type though. And I'm going to [presses a button marked save and add fields next to save product type and cancel under description and explanation or submission guidelines] save and add fields. And on the jersey I'm going to add a size [clicks on add new field button and fills in field marked label] size [fills-in field marked field_] size. [selects a drop down marked type of data to store an selects list]. This is going to be a list text because, you know, I am going to have a discrete number of options available for this. [moves to the last drop down on the line called select list] And this field - I'm just going to leave it as select list.

[moves the line of data up the screen a little by clicking and draggint an x-shaped anchor]
[scrolls to an allowed values list which is the heading over a large blank box above some text saying "the possible values this field can contain"]
Right, now for my allowed values I'm just going to do my
S/Small
M/Medium
L/Large
XL/Extra Large There we go
23'
[presses save] We also have as fields attached to products we have our own custom set of setting here. So these are: this whole set of fields here is called Attribute Field Settings. And whenever I'm adding a field to a product type I can choose to have that field function on add to cart buttons as an attribute. You don't have to expose it if you don't want it to be [exposed]. But in our case I do want this size field to be available on add to cart forms as a selectable option. And then I can choose whether I want it to be a select list or radio buttons. I'll go ahead and leave it as select list but for theming purposes you may want it to show up as radio buttons. And one example I threw-up onto this site before the session is that there is a cosmetics site that is selling lipstick. They want, for each of their options, a colour-splash to show up. Instead of the name of the colour they want people to a actually click on the colour that they want to purchase. And so they would use radio buttons. And then theme the radio buttons to use their colour swatch. And then like hide the actual radio button itself. And it all functions great.
24'
And the way they did that was that instead of using like a list text field, they used a taxonomy term reference field, and they put in their different colour options as taxonomy terms, and because terms are now entities in Drupal 7, they can add an image field to them. So they would put in the name of the colour, they would attach the image to that term, then use that as their attribute on the add to cart form, and then just swap-in the actual colour swatch for the name of the taxonomy term. It worked great! It was great to see that happen. Nobody has made a generic module out of that yet, but in a situation where you need to do that, just know that there are one or two issues [like this] in the cue that are go through the whole process of show example code, and hopefully we'll get that boiled down into an actual helpful module or a tutorial or something.
24'47"
Here we go. I've just exposed - or: I've just added a field to my custom product type that will be exposed to the add to cart form . Let's just create a jersey. Let's go ahead and start off with our
[SKU filed of] TONY_ROMO_S. And we'll do small. And as I mentioned, normally we wouldn't have to set here and type every single one of your different options.
[Title field of]Tony Roo Jersey, Small. I didn't have one of the most recent version of the bulk product creation module available, so I'm just going to go ahead and type a couple of them: I won't do them all.
[SIZE field: Small S]
And these things go for like rediculousness or something - like $80 or $70? And it's Tony Romo. So it's like: $65. I know, honestly I don't have much room to speak because I'm a Colts [sports team] fan. I don't have any room to speak because I'm a Colts fan. [this is the sort of thing you say to fit-in in Texas]. They're leading right now? Oh they're playing the Redskins [team]. OK, I was totally a guess but they're playing the Redskins. I reckoned they would be leading OK. So I'm just going to do two so I don't take a whole lot of time filling in all these different options. But I now have two different
26'
Jerseys available. I'm going to go to the front end now and create a new product display. I'm going to go through content [on the bar at the to of the admin screen] to node content [drops down]. You'll see that I have my new node type here. So lets add a new one. This will be our Tony Romo jersey. And I'm going to put the size and the title. And instead what you can see is if you enter the SKU it does the auto-complete so I'm going to choose my small. And medium in Tony Romo Jerseys. And when I click save and view the node, I should now have a select list. Oh and I forgot to upload the images. Oh well. We have a few things going-on here. One thing we're going to have to change. But first of all you can see that my attribute field is showing up here for me to select something that I can add to the cart. And the way that this works is that the add to cart form looks at all the products that are set to display here, and it says "Hey! These are all the same type. So these should have all the same fields on them. So instead of showing a select list -
27'
instead of having just one select list that said sort of Tony Romo Jersey Small; Tony Romo Jersey Medium, it know that both of these products have a size field on them, and so it can extract from that the name of the field, and the options available, and lets you actually chose them from a select list. And it can do this for any number of attribute fields. So if you were doing this for size and colour and they were dependant, so you only had small medium and large available in red but you had small medium large and extra large available in blue, it would only show valid product combinations. It uses Drupal 7's sort of Ajax stuff to sort of select the appropriate one as you change options on the form. And then behind the scenes it knows exactly which product ID it is referencing,. So when I change this to medium there's a hidden product field or whatever. So I think the product availability was 3. It changes it to 4. And if those products had different prices, then it would re-render that [price] field. So actually I reckon it's good that [inaudible] because we can see that this [size] has been re-rendered, so it says medium instead of small. I call it product field injection. So evey time you have a product reference field, and its displaying in an add to cart form, whenever that add to cart form changes, you can tell Drupal Commerce to update any visible modules from that product on the node, so this node, whenever its content array was being rendered or whatever. I'll see if we can go to development and show you. Maybe not. I haven't looked before. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it's not worth looking. Right: it's not worth looking right now. But any time a node or a user or a taxonomy term or any kind of entity that has a product reference field on it is rendered, the product reference field module will also say "Hey! Do any fields from the product itself also need to rendered into this output?" And that lets you show on the page any field from the product
28'
or any attribute of it like the title of the product or the SKU. And so all that stuff is governed by the fields when you attach them to your product and by the display node. So it's honestly this is still like that this is a confusing thing because you have like two different field interfaces [UIs]. You have the field_ui for the node type and the field_ui for the product type. And knowing where to go to change a particular type of display or a particular action can be confusing. So I won't belabour it too much other than to hop-in real quick and disable the size field because you [programmer] don't really need it because I [shop customer] know which size it is because I'm selecting that in the add to cart form.

And so if I go to my content types [from admin menu, drops down from "content"] Oh, lets try the next one that's "structure> content types> product display" I'm going to go-manage my display. You can see in here all the fields that are coming from the product. So the product image, the product price, product is the actual product reference field that shows-up as the add to cart form.
30'
And if you get-on from there you can see the product size field. I don't want it visible so I'm just going to mark it hidden. You know if I wanted to I could show the SKU, I could show the title. Those things are hidden by default. And then I need to do that for my other view node as well. So for Teaser we'll go in here and hide size.
30'30"
Yes: the question was actually how is the reference handled for prouduct data from like a node or a user or whatever? And it's actually a custom product reference field. It pre-dates both the relatation and the reference and everything else. Maybe for [version] 2.X we're looking at depending on entity reference or something similar, but right now it's just a product reference field. The scheme has just one database column. That's product id. And then from that product ID we create the add to cart form or a list of skus or titles or whatever else. Um Yes. So there we go. Yes. Follow-up question over here: red shirt.
31'
So the question was: What exactly is happening with the image field?
And you see I actually forgot to attach an image field to my custom product type here. So lets go ahead and do that just so I can demonstrate. Will the image be spoft[?] in as well? And the answer is Yes. As long as the image is attached to your product type then any field, again, that is coming from the product , if it is visible on the page will be re-rendered whenever that default button on the add to cart form is changed.

So if I go to image and add - I'll just make sure I have an image field - and then if I go edit my jersey products. I'll just use two different jerseys: one that's blue and one that's white for obviisity. There. We have Jaon Mitten. And we do have a Tony Romo I think. Yes there we go. Alright. So if I come back to the product display that has the two different products referenced on it, we'll see the small. The jersey looks really big. And if we change to medium, the jersey looks even bigger. So it's re-rendered as well.
33'
So again this is just a demonstration of what elements Drupal Commerce lets you bring to the table to let you build your product displays. If you get Drupal Commerce out of the box; if you just grab Commerrce from Drupalcommerce.org/projects/commerce. It isn't going to set-up product node types, it isn't going to set-up product types for you. This stuff is happening because we are using Commerce Kickstart. And the idea once again is that we did not want to make any assumptions about what kind of products you are selling. But we do get a lot of tools to build very dynamic add to cart forms. In Ubercart you had to use two or three different modules to get images showing-up, or to produce option images. You couldn't really render fields from your product data into the node. You just couldn't do this. And now we can because of fields and because of entities and because of, specially, the new ajax framework baked-in to the forms api.

Lets move-on to a cusomisable jersey. We're going to go to a Store>add a product. Oh - you know: just for the sake of time I'm going to re-use my basic product type, and just show this.
admin/commerce/products
34'
So not only can we add fields to our product types in our add to cart form. We can add line item types and have those show up on the add to cart form. So let me come over here to Store>configuration>line items. And you''ll see that I have one product line item type. And the way that the cart works and the way that the orders work in Drupal Commerce is that when you ad something to the cart, a product line item is created for it , and attached to an order. So as soon as somebody clicks add-to-cart they have a full order object. There is (like) no pseudo-cart order object thing. It is like a full order with revisions that keeps track of additions, deletions; it saves what ever data you try to add on the checkout form as soon as possible, so you're not loosing a lot of that valuable marketing data that we weren't tracking before.
34'50"
And so a line item is anything on the order that feeds into the price. It could be your products, or, once I install the shipping module, it could be a shipping line item. For certain kinds of discounts it could be a discount line item. Also for those fields - you can add fields to them and expose them to the add to cart form. So that before somebody submits add to cart they actually specify additional data to store with that product line item in the order.

I don't want to use my one basic product type and add fields to that, because then every time I add products to my web site they going to have the customisation options. It doesn't make sense to ask for somebody's last name to customise a football - their autographed football. So I want to use a different product line item type from my customisable stuff versus my basic products. I have a module that's sort of in the works. I need to finish it up (I'll install some other stuff as we go). I have a module called customisable products - if I can find it! - oh there's the inline product form module - that will let me create additional product line item types for use with different types of customisation. And other areas you might need this would be things like a donation form where you want someone to specify a custom donation amount. And use that amount they specify as the sort of unit price of that line item in the shopping cart. If you go to commerceguys.com there's a great tutorial by Randy Fey that demonstrates that right now. You might also use it for event registrations where the product is a different level of event registration, and then the different fields they have to fill-in our their name, attendee name if they're registering other people, email address, company name, or whatever else. You know - "name on the badge" versus "name on the form".

And so there are many different use cases for creating custom product line item types. We originally developed it for one of our clients that was selling customisable T shirts and lighters and whatever else. They needed to store these design tags with their line item but they had other products that didn't need that stuff. And so we needed multiple types of line items that would function as products in the cart.
37'
And you see now I have installed my shipping module so you see I have my shipping line item type. I've also installed customisable products , so I have this new "add a customisable product" link that I can use to add a customisable product line item type. Well we'll just go ahead and use custom jersey because it's available. Save that line item type. And now I have two types of product line item. So that means that when somebody clicks add-to-cart , we can use either one of these things. The customer jersey line item type or just the basic product line item type. Lets go ahead and edit this one because I am going to go and add my text field. This is for custom jerseys to capture the [add a text field] custom name. And we'll make this just a basic text field. And save. Alright So: we've got the next link [button marked "save product fields"] and so just like with the product fields we had that additional field set where you had your add to cart form settings with fields attached to line items.
38'
You're also going to have add-to-cart form settings. And this one is just a single check box that says "include this field on Add to Cart forms for buy items of this type." So I am going to go ahead and save this and then go and view our products. Lets go back to our Troy Aikman Football. And if you look at this add-to-cart form you will notice that there is no - you know - no name field visible. We can add this to the cart. It doesn't ask me for my name even though I made that a required field. And the reason being: this add to cart form is using the basic product line item type. It does not have any additional fields associated with it.

Let's go an refocus on Product Two. Product two is - let's see - our custom jerseys. Let's go ahead and add a product. Make this a jersey. And this is our custom jersey. Let's write that (SKU) down again. And this is a small jersey. And this is very expensive. Click image. Choose a file. Choose "custom". Right. Now I've got a product now that I want to use my custom jerseys. Now what I want to do is figure out how I want to get this product associated with the different product line item type. Usually what you do is add another separate type of product display. One product display is for my regular product line items. The other one is going to be for my custom product line items. The reason for that is the setting that lets you specify which product line item you want to use is tied to this add to cart form. And this add to cart form is coming from a display formatter. So you have to have a separate node type to have a different set of display format settings. I know this is kind of confusing. Lets go ahead and add this. A new content type called a custom product display node. We're going to add fields to it. In this case just a single product reference field.
40'
Oh and here's the checkbox here underneath "required field" which directs you to "include some reference products". Again there are so many things that we are injecting into the field forms that I know that all of this is going to fly right over your head until you use it, but at least you are aware that this is how Commerce works. It is working through the existing field system. And then you pull all these Commerce pieces together. But if I go to look at my display, I have my product field here. Let's go ahead and hide its label. And it is displayed as an add to cart form. You scroll over here to the right. This is new for Drupal 7 so if you haven't yet used Drupal 7 you don't know about this, but you can have settings for any sort of display formatter now. And in this case the settings for the add to cart form are: should it have a quantity of Widget? Let people say they want 1, 2, 3 of these at once? What should the default quantity be? Should like items be added to the same product that's added to the same cart? Should it show up as a separate line item or should it just increment the quantity of the existing line item? And then the very last one is the add to cart line item type. That's set to Product because that's just the default. Lets go ahead and edit this. Change it from using Product to Custom Jersey. So when I hit update. I go create products of this node type. You'll see the add to cart form with the little name text field. Lets go add one. Add content. Custom product display.

Its making me nervous having that thing next to the computer - my last mac was trashed by electronics falling on the laptop.

I'm not going to go through the full setup here because it's taking a lot more time than I anticipated. But you see now that the add to cart form has a custom text field that I didn't have to specify. And this data, because it's just field data. It's not like we're attaching it to an array and then serialising this data and adding it to the product in the cart. That's what Ubercart does with its attributes. Instead this is field data that can be attached to the line item of the product in the cart. You can get to this data using Views; you can get ot this data using Rules. Whatever you need. So if I was usingthis system for event registration, I could build a massive list of all the people registered for my event by just producing a View of this particular Field. And in this case this field maybe shows the order number that that came from, and whatever else you need to do with it. And according to Randy's tutorial on donations (you know: custom donation products), because this is field data: Rules has access to it. And with Drupal Commerce you can add product pricing rules, that will take the price and alter the price of the product before its added to the cart based on whatever parameters you need. So that could be: you just look at the field like the custom price that somebody specifies as their donation amount would be the price of that product added to the cart.

The question at the back.
43'23"
The question was pertaining to custom pricing and discounting and what-not.
What Drupal Commerce does is that it runs every custom-pricing rule through a single event that it calls "calculating the sell-price of a product". And so this is all done through Rules right now. There are reasons for it that I can explain afterwards. But you have under your Configuration Menu a product-pricing-rules-item, and that lets you set-up your discounts, sales-tax, fees, price lists, currency conversion: whatever, all using Rules. In this case, lets go ahead and just make this a "half off day: half off everything". Save. [curser hovers over "add an action" link] And what I am going to do is add an action to this, called "multiply the unit price of a line item". Because whenever you calculate the sale price of a product, it's done through a pseudo-line item. So when Commerce is about to display a product price, what it asks is "what would the price of this product be, if it were in your shopping cart, right now". So it creates a line item that doesn't save that would reference your order and reference the product, and it passes it through Rules so that anything can operate on that to change the price, add tax, whether it's VAT or sales tax or whatever, and then spit that final price out as your purchase price for the product.

So we're going to thumb-through the line items. I am selecting a "line item action". That's going to multiply the unit action called "multiply the unit price by some amount". In my case I'm going to multiply it by 0.5. And I am going to say that this should show-up on the checkout form as a discount. And I'll choose how that should be rounded, if at all. And now if I go back and look at my product page. I had some footballs in my cart. They automatically got updated to be ½-off, so that's $30 instead of $60 (they'd be cheaper if americans didn't bother with leather, silly arses) and notice that whatever is going to be in your shopping cart is always going to show the most recent price. That's called the "shopping cart refresh". So somebody won't have stale data in their cart if they come back a month later and prices have changed: it's always going to be updated. If you go to checkout: you can actually see that this will show-up on my checkout form as my half-off discount. So all that stuff is tied together and done through Rules.

The same is true for taxes so if I go back to store>configeration>taxes , lets add a Texas sales tax. I think it's 6.25% is that right? 8.25% - oh it's changed. Move to Kentucky it's cheaper [the UK's NHS service runs for only 10% of GDP so although taxes are higher it's cheap too]. And now that I have that tax on there, of course, go-up, and it's an error! This always happens, doesn't it, on tech-demos. OK. It sill still show-up here. I'm going to have to debug that later. I haven't fully tested everything against the latest version of entity api apparently, but you can see that I have my sales tax, which if I am not mistaken is going to come-up at a discounted price but I can't do the Math that quick. So here we have my Texas sales tax. Total $34.95. And all this stuff is coming from a price field attached to the order and it just shows the breakdown. We have what we call "price components" so every price, whether it is a price on a line item or a unit price, or a product sell price, or or the order in total price or the order itself. All these prices have in themselves a change-log of how that price got to where it was. What pieces went-in to making this-price this-price. That includes the base price of the products, discount that came off it, the sales tax that was added, and you can use that to build custom price displays to run your reports on how much tax was collected or whatever else.

Question up front?
The qustion was: Can we have a tax by product? [47.08]
Yes. You just use Rules to change the conditions for the applicatbility of that tax.
So if I went to my store menu again (and I have kind of run-out of time or I would have cruised-through a lot of this stuff) if I go to my taxes menu [bottom item] you can see my tax rates. You can see there is this ambiguous operations link here [right hand side] which is called "configured component" and in Rules-speak what that is is a kind [?] subtlety that detirmines whether this tax should apply to something. So if I go in there, you'll see the full Rules user interface where you can add conditions that detirmine whether this particular tax should be applied to the line item. So I can make this detirmined by some atrribute of the product itself: maybe food items aren't taxed and jerseys are. I can make that detirmined by the shipping or billing address of the customer. Most places it's detirmined by where you're shipping it to. So I would want to go and check the shipping address and make sure that it was Texas before applying the Texas sales tax. So that, again, is all done through Rules. And this all comes through the product pricing system. So product pricing rules is your main point for adding discounts, and taxes, swapping-in prices and custom prices, and price-lists, and everything else.

I can't remember the other objective I set myself for showing this site. I was going to show discount shipping. I don't have time to go through this and build it. So just real quickly I can show you on realmilkcheese.com. Actually this is my first ever personal e-commerce web site. And it actually is responsive so lets see if it works for us right here. The pressure's on [typing and waiting]. Realmilkcheese.com is just a very rushed-out website selling an Amish farmer's cheese. So it's selling raw milk goods, it's kind of yummy, but it's kind of expensive. So what we're trying to do is simplify bulk purchasing. If customers buy $100 of more of his cheese they can get free shipping. What I did was I used the shipping module and the flat rate module . This is Shipping [module version] 2.X. If you are about to use a commerce site use the 2.X branch not the 1.X. And then another module called Flat Rate. Also confusingly, this is not the Shipping Flat Rate Module; just the Flat Rate Module. I'll have that all cleaned-up on the shipping project page soon. So what we did was use the Shipping Module and the Flat Rate Module to - oh! security updates! Great! I've just gone and shown everybody that I have an insecure website! I have my Flat Rate Shipping Method and if you look at the services that I have defined for Flat Rate, I have a "Standard" and a "Free" shipping method. So my "Standard" is 16 bucks or something; free is going to be $Zero. Free is only going to be available for orders that total over $100. So that's easy enough to do.

Just like with Taxes you have a Configure Component link; you have it here for shipping as well. So I just go in here and add a simple Condition. That evaluates, or compares against the order total: "Is it greater than $99.99?" (These comparisons are done in the minor unit of the currency so comparisons are done in pennies or cents or whatever else, so just remember that when you are setting-up your pricing rules). In this case the order is over $99.99. The free shipping should show-up. If it's under $99.99, then standard shipping should show-up. The problem that I ran into was "What if someone selects Standard Shipping and that bumps-up the total to over $100? - then suddenly free shipping becomes available". What we had to do was we added some conditions into the shipping module itself that lets you also specify: "Is the order total over $100 in itself, and the order doesn't have shipping applied to it?". So if you're setting-up rules for shipping, just remember that you have to have that exlusion, because someone could go forward and checkout, save their order, and then come-back and choose the free option and go for it. You don't want that to happen. So you have got to use both things: the data comparison, and also the check that they don't already have shipping applied to their order.

That's how we set-up free shipping. With the Flat Rate module it's very simple to add just as many flat rates as you need. Then with the Shipping Rates again once the base rate has been calculated, coming from that flat rate, you also run that through Rules again, to manipulate the rate further. So if you do weight-based shipping where it's $5 + $3/pound [of weight]. You do the same thing by setting-up a flat rate for $5, and then you use rules to add a conditional $ to it per pound or $3 per pound. There's a lot of stuff you can do using Rules and using the Fields about those Rules that we have set-up [pointing at a part of an admin screen under config>workflow>rules>components - worth looking at at full screen mode] headed "Conditions" and then boxes for "ELEMENTS", "OPERATIONS", repeated under another heading of "Actions".

And we are out of time here and I regret running out of time and I regret that we haven't really cracked the demo. If you have any questions, I'll stand out in the hallway and feel free to come and bug me with them
you're welcome to bug me with them about Drupal Commerce. Thanks for paying attention and for bearing with me, and I'll see you guys next time.

[answers another question - Oh yes? What's that? Sure, Sure]

Two things.

There's real milk cheese here if you want it, right up here. Actually I have half a brick of smoked pepper and applejack so if you want some of that come and ask me.

We're doing a full three million dollar training down in Florida next month .... go to ctraining.commerce on Drupal for that. There are also (paid for) videos on Lynda.com and (paid for) videos on Drupalise.me so there are all sorts of resources out there to teach you how to use Drupal Commerce. [+ http://www.ostraining.com/blog/drupal/ for non-commerce text instructions]

Alright. Thanks a lot.

Transcription: translators see this footnote
Some of the jargon is italicised, more or less at random.
Speaking style is Germanic English with maximum
hyphenated-together-words.
Sentences are unstructured and meaning
depends on context a lot.
Some apologetic linking words like so and and
are added to the starts of sentences. I have taken a few of them off again in transcription. Translaters will have trouble.

Wednesday, 14 December 2011

Something is not quite right.

I know that options two and three on my last post overlap; I do not know a nifty way to make a desktop installation turn into a server-hosted one without the use of file transfer with a program like Filezilla.

Drupal being Drupal, there is also a question of where to put certain modules which are packed in an installation but may be better put in a sites/all/modules/ folder (not the "modules" folder: that would be too easy). Looking at the error message below, there is probably still more to learn.

Requirements problem

Installation tasks

Choose profile(done)

Choose language(done)

Verify requirements(active)

Set up database

Install profile

Configure site

Example store

Finished

Error message

Warning: opendir(./profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/addressfield) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(./profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/commerce) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(./profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/ctools) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(./profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/entity) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(./profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/rules) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(./profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/views) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/addressfield) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/commerce) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/ctools) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/entity) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/rules) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/views) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/addressfield) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/commerce) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/ctools) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/entity) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/rules) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/views) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/addressfield) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/commerce) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/ctools) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/entity) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/rules) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).

Warning: opendir(profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/views) [function.opendir]: failed to open dir: No error in file_scan_directory() (line 2026 of C:\e\veganline\includes\file.inc).